JTMS 2014; 1(1): 51–73 Marco Di Branco and Kordula Wolf Hindered Passages. The Failed Muslim Con- quest of Southern Italy Abstract: The establishment of an Aghlabid, then Fāṭimid-Kalbid dominion in Sicily had a deep impact not only on the island and on Mediterranean power constellations, but also on mainland Italy, especially in its Southern parts. Al- though the Peninsula was under continuous attack between the ninth and elev- enth centuries, all attempts to place it under submission failed on a long-term basis. Examining three examples of ‘hindered passages’, this article proposes some new considerations about the question of this missed Muslim conquest. Besides the numerous raids, the establishment of many military bases and Christian-Muslim agreements on the mainland during the Aghlabid and Fā- ṭimid-Kalbid period points to a targeted politics of conquest. Furthermore, the fragmentation of Southern Italy, often claimed as the main cause for the ‘Sara- cen’ destructions, could, on the contrary, also be seen as the main obstacle to Muslim expansion due to its many fortified centres. Keywords: Southern Italy, Muslim Sicily, Islamic conquest, Aghlabids, Kalbids DOI 10.1515/jtms-2014-0003 || Marco Di Branco, Deutsches Historisches Institut, Roma, [email protected] Kordula Wolf, Deutsches Historisches Institut, Roma, [email protected] 1 State of the Art Between the ninth and the eleventh century, Southern Italy and Sicily were confronted with a strong Muslim presence structurally linked to the two great Islamic dynasties of North Africa, the Aghlabids and the Fāṭimids.1 In Sicily, soon after the first successful operations of the Aghlabid military leader and “qāḍī” Asad ibn al-Furāt (d. 213/828), a Muslim dominion was founded and destined to conquer piecemeal – with varying degrees of success and failure over 150 years – almost the whole island and to persist until the Norman con- || 1 Still fundamental for the Muslim history of medieval Italy is the work of AMARI 1933–1939. See also the more recent monographs CILENTO 1971; GABRIELI/SCERRATO 1979; MUSCA 1992; METCALFE 2009; CHIARELLI 2011; NEF 2011a; FENIELLO 2011. Bereitgestellt von | DHI-Deutsches Historisches Institut Roma Angemeldet | [email protected] Autorenexemplar Heruntergeladen am | 21.10.14 08:42 52 | Marco Di Branco and Kordula Wolf quests. On the Italian mainland, however, a durable Muslim authority could never be established. In both regions, local governors and people showed great resistance and, through hard-fought battles, were able to prevent a quick con- quest, so that a type of frontier guerrilla operation (“guérilla frontalière”) pre- vailed for decades.2 In both regions, pillage, destruction and force were the order of the day, especially in territories not yet under submission. And, in both regions, we also had significant collaborations between Muslims and Christians. Sicily and Southern Italy were fluid border regions which we could term a kind of “Passagenraum” in Walter Benjamin’s sense, a mobile transcultural and transreligious area of passage, both to a certain degree permeable and in con- tinuous transition.3 But despite all similarities: why did the ‘passage’ of a centralized, sustained Muslim power to the Apennines Peninsula fail in a long-term perspective, mak- ing a sustainable arabisation and islamisation impossible? Analyzing this ques- tion means casting light on complex historical processes that, in certain mo- ments, were hindered or interrupted by various factors.4 But it means also taking a position within the debate as to what extent the “amīrs” and governors of Ifrīqiya and Sicily planned and tackled expansion to mainland Italy. The different points of view in this regard depend, for the most part, on the under- standing of the permanent raids witnessed by our sources and on the way the practice of “ǧihād” in the Peninsula is reflected. Some historians distinguish different phases: a first one characterized by planned expansion to the Peninsu- la under the sign of “ǧihād” until the 870s, and a second one marked by uncon- trolled raids of ‘bands’ and only few short-term official wars.5 Others are con- || 2 NEF/PRIGENT 2013, p. 32. 3 Obviously this applies also to other contexts not considered in this article, for instance for the Norman and Staufian times. For ‘passages’ as a new paradigm of transcultural medieval stud- ies see BORGOLTE/TISCHLER 2012a, p. 12–15; TISCHLER 2013. 4 In our case, speaking of ‘forbidden’ passages seems inappropriate, because there never ex- isted a general prohibition which banned Muslims from setting foot on the mainland. What we have, however, are occasional or local prohibitions, such as a passage in the Divisio Principatus Beneventani (848), in which any cooperation with and any sojourning by the “Sarraceni” was interdicted in the duchies of Benevent and Salerno, or pope John VIII’s eloquent letters in which any contact between Muslims and Christians was denounced as a sin and an act that endangered the whole of Christianity: “... ut pariter expellamus de ista provincia nostra omnes Sarracenos quomodocumque potuerimus; et amodo ... nullum Sarracenum recipiam vel reci- pere permittam, preter illos qui temporibus domni Siconis et Sicardi fuerunt Christiani, si magarizati non sunt”, Praeceptum concessionis sive capitulare, p. 212; IOHANNES VIII PAPA Epis- tolae passim. 5 GABRIELI 1974, p. 3; MARAZZI 2007, p. 182 sq. Bereitgestellt von | DHI-Deutsches Historisches Institut Roma Angemeldet | [email protected] Autorenexemplar Heruntergeladen am | 21.10.14 08:42 Hindered Passages. The Failed Muslim Conquest of Southern Italy | 53 vinced that not even during this first period was there any sustained or system- atic attempt to consolidate territory out of Sicily or to establish defensible bridgeheads which could have facilitated a wider invasion, whereas raids tend- ed to acquire quick booty or to act as a distraction for the disaffected among the Muslim ranks.6 On the other hand – perhaps influenced by Francesco Gabrieli’s assumption that the Strait of Messina constituted a borderline between Sicily as ‘the house of Islam’ (“dār al-Islām”) and Southern Italy as ‘the house of war’ (“dār al-ḥarb”)7 – some scholars interconnect raids and “ǧihād” without ex- pounding on their possible different nature and without intensively reflecting on to what extent and in which way both phenomena were related to each oth- er.8 In such a perspective, the more than two hundred years of Muslim mainland presence becomes simply a history of permanent ‘holy war’, while theories based on the Islamic law are consciously or unconsciously placed as the back- drop of countless acts of violence and possible differences in local praxis are both temporally and spatially neglected. Recently, these and other questions have been re-examined in terms of Aghlabid Sicily – with interesting points that are worthy of reflection also in connection with the Italian mainland because of the many striking similarities between the two regions. That’s why the question of ‘hindered passages’ gains new relevance as differences between Sicily and Southern Italy must probably be explained by factors other than the political and military approach of the Muslim authorities or the character of the Chris- tian-Muslim frontier space. 2 The Sources But what about the sources? If we first want to consider “ǧihād” officially proclaimed as a manifest indication of a planned expansion on mainland Italy, we are able to glean little information from the sources. Unless we include nu- merous references to looting, destruction, captivity, and killing, witnessed es- pecially in Latin texts, the term “ǧihād”, explicitly relating to the Peninsula, appears connected only to two episodes in medieval Arabic sources: the first time for the Aghlabid “amīr” Ibrāhīm II in the years 900–902, and the second || 6 METCALFE 2009, p. 16. 7 GABRIELI 1979b, p. 109. 8 VENTURA 1982, p. 81 sq.; DEL LUNGO 2000, especially p. 71; FENIELLO 2011, passim and in par- ticular p. 65 sq. Bereitgestellt von | DHI-Deutsches Historisches Institut Roma Angemeldet | [email protected] Autorenexemplar Heruntergeladen am | 21.10.14 08:42 54 | Marco Di Branco and Kordula Wolf time for the Kalbid “amīr” Abū ’l-Qāsim in 982.9 A second aspect to consider is that attempts to conquer mainland Italy were seen as a sort of negative appen- dix to the broader phenomenon which is commonly defined as the ‘great Islam- ic conquests’. It is well known that also the military expeditions led by the Prophet and those led by the Muslim generals sent by the first caliphs to occupy Syria and Iraq are actually, at least in their initial phase, nothing more than raids. In particular, the famous ‘Battle of Badr’, which, according to the Islamic historians and jurists, represents the classical archetype of the “ǧihād”,10 was little more than a raid against a Meccan caravan. Equally, the first Arab attacks against Syria began already in the last years of the life of Muḥammad, on a small scale and without too much success, in the form of sudden attacks on villages and caravans aimed at the acquisition of booty.11 Those to the Mesopo- tamian region also began, under the leadership of al-Mutannā ibn al-Ḥāriṯa, as raids and plunders carried out in order to affirm the right of nomads to demand a tribute.12 The apparently impromptu character of the early Islamic conquests led some scholars to focus on their incidental factors: the movement would not have had any consistency and would not have been led by a central authority, but would